
To accommodate smooth sliding camera movements during the animation, a motion controller add-on was also written. Thanks to its open source nature, Python Blender add-ons were written to create light paths and convert them into an efficient sequence that could be executed by the hardware. The first step was to export the animations out of Blender. This project is the culmination of a lot of software, electronic and mechanical work, all coming together under tight tolerances, and ’s skill really shines. An animation is created in Blender then each frame is automatically exported and traced out by an RGB LED on a 3D gantry. has done just that, by creating a process which allows animations formed in Blender to be traced out in 3D as light paintings. This is pretty hard to do when moving a light around by hand: it’s mostly guesswork, as it’s difficult to see the results of your efforts until after the photo has been taken. But what if you could make the patterns really precise? What if you could model them in 3D? Whilst most light paintings are single shots, some artists painstakingly create frame-by-frame animations. The distance from one plane to the next is also a factor, as you can imagine.Īim the Sun Lamp almost directly facing your image planes, with enough rotation to create a shadow in the direction you desire.Light painting: there’s something that never gets old about waving lights around in a long exposure photo. The Sun Lamp's Strength determines how bright the lighting is, and its Size determines how soft or hard your shadows will be. You can choose between Straight Alpha and Premultiplied Alpha.Īdd a Sun Lamp, which is a type of lamp that lights from one direction evenly as if coming from a gigantic light source like the sun. You'll want to check "Use Alpha" and select "Diffuse & Transparent". The add-on includes some handy preset options.

You can then add your cut-out images from the File Menu. To get your textured planes in to Blender the easiest way is with the Import Images As Planes add-on, which is included with Blender so it's as easy as enabling in your Preferences. That said, if you want a method that doesn't involve compositing you can always use textured planes with transparency and give it nice even lighting with a Sun Lamp.
#Copying the lighting from a photo blender full
Note: If you get aliasing issues, enable Full Sample in the render settings. Then in the node editor, you simply need to multiply the Color and Shadow passes to get your shadeless but with a shadow effect:Īnd then use the ID Mask node to isolate the objects that you want to be shadeless, and use that as the Fac to mix the raw render and the shadeless part together (so that only the objects that you want to be shadeless are shadeless):

